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Can You Buy A Grain Of Salt At Amazon Go?

After more than a decade as a strategic SEO tent pole, link building has become a divisive topic in the SEO community. Some, as a reaction to Google’s Penguin update and John Mueller’s dissuasive comments on link building in general, have taken the position that link building is “dead,” or that it should be entirely avoided. Others, like myself, believe that link building isn’t just effective—it’s absolutely necessary if you want to build a successful SEO campaign. The challenge is to build links properly.

The Semantics of Link Building

After reading my introductory paragraph, you may find yourself divided on the issue: if all these experts can’t agree, why would I risk such a strategy in the first place? After all, poor link building practices can lead manual and algorithmic penalties in the search rankings which can reduce your online visibility drastically.

To address this, I want to clear up the semantics of the phrase “link building.” Prior to April of 2012 (the release of Google’s Penguin algorithm), link building generally referred to the process of inserting links into every site you could find willing to host them. Prior to the Penguin algorithm, this was an effective way to get your site to rank higher in search engines, but today, Google’s standards are far stricter (thanks to Penguin and other link quality updates), and any similar attempts will get your website penalized. This is the type of practice most naysayers refer to when they say link building is dead—and in that case, they’re right. Nobody should be doing this anymore.

When I refer to link building (or “modern” link building), I’m referring to high quality strategies which revolve around well-written, well-researched, highly valuable, original content. Some strategies involve producing specific pieces of content with relevant, valuable embedded links pointing back to your domain published on high-authority websites. Others involve the production, publication, and syndication of high-value content on your own website, with the intention of achieving viral reach, and naturally attracting inbound links to the content on its own merits.

In either scenario, the links you earn are objectively valuable—and pretty much necessary if you want your domain to rank well in organic search. Even beyond SEO, there are clear benefits of link building, and below are just 10 of them:

1. Domain & Page Authority. When Google determines which pages to rank for a given query, one of its biggest considerations is the quantity and quality of inbound links to the page. Seattle-based Internet marketing company Moz has developed a way to measure this, which is called page authority, a subjective measure of the quality and quantity of inbound links to a page. Similarly, domain authority measures this for your website as a whole. The higher your domain authority, the higher you’re likely to rank for any relevant search query. The number of relevant links pointing back to your domain (along with the quality of those sources and other quality factors) determines a major portion of that domain authority, so the more invested you are in the quality of your link building campaign, the higher propensity all of your site pages will have to rank in organic search results.

2. Referral Traffic. Let’s set SEO aside for a moment and talk about a more obvious (though sometimes forgotten) benefit of link building. Those links exist indefinitely, and can be clicked by readers. If a user reading your material wants to learn more about your topic, they can follow your link and get back to your site with relative ease. As you get deeper into your link building strategy, you may find the referral traffic you get this way far exceeds what you earn from higher rankings .